“We consecrated every event in our home with some dish. On Christmas Eve I would force down the baccalà (salted cold) and six other fish dishes that my red-meat family otherwise snubbed as I waited for my father’s return from his annual holiday cocktail next door at the Pfalzengraffs, a German-Italian family blessed with two voluptuous teenage girls who walked me to school. I dreamed of stealing a moment under the mistletoe with plush Arabella while my siblings devoured plate after plate of linguini with calamari, spaghetti alle vongole, and, worst of all, stuffed shrimp, an American concoction that had never graced a Calabrian table in the Old Country. Soon enough we would hear my father’s footsteps. We hoped he had won a peck from Arabella or her equally curvy sister Karin—anything to calm him down during the messy unwrapping of the gifts, the ritual that brought out his inner Mussolini.”